Memoing as a reflective tool: generating insight into pedagogical practice in Home Economics

Reflection is widely positioned as an important component of teachers’ professional learning and responses to curriculum change. However, reflective activity can become focused on evaluation, description, or identifying what worked, potentially limiting opportunities to examine the assumptions, tensions, and uncertainties underlying practice. This think-piece explores memoing, adapted from qualitative inquiry, as a complementary approach for sustaining more analytic forms of reflection during curricular reform. The memo excerpts presented were generated during the development of a pedagogical framework for practical Home Economics using a constructivist grounded theory approach. Rather than presenting the framework itself, this paper examines memoing within the research process and considers what the practice reveals about professional learning, reflexivity, and pedagogical reasoning. Drawing on reflective and critical practice, transformative learning, practitioner inquiry, writing as inquiry, and grounded theory, the paper conceptualises memoing as writing that makes developing interpretations visible and open to reconsideration. The analysis illustrates how memos preserve uncertainty, surface tensions, and trace shifts in professional reasoning as curriculum reform is interpreted and enacted. Memoing is therefore presented not as a replacement for established reflective practices, but as a complementary analytic practice through which educators remain attentive to complexity while developing provisional understandings of practice.